Wolfgang Bartels (politician, 1890)

Wolfgang Bartels (born July 11, 1890 in Hayn (Harz) , † October 24, 1971 in Munich ) was a socialist politician and journalist.

Life

Bartels, son of a district forester, attended the Leibniz-Gymnasium in Hanover and then the journalist college in Berlin, in the following years he worked a. a. for the Frankfurter Zeitung and was a member of the left-liberal Democratic Association . A soldier since 1913, after the outbreak of World War I he was initially employed in the infantry, and after being wounded in 1918 in the Air Force. In the same year he also joined the SPD .

During the November Revolution in 1918, he was chairman of the soldiers' council in Doblen / Kurland . After returning to Germany in 1919, he joined the USPD and worked as an editor for the party organs of the Hamburger Volkszeitung , Leipziger Volkszeitung and the Socialist Republic (Cologne). At the end of 1920, Bartels belonged to the left majority wing, which at the end of 1920 merged with the KPD to form the VKPD .

In the years that followed, Bartels was briefly imprisoned several times (including by the Belgian authorities in the Rhineland, the French authorities in Saarland and because of an insult to Gustav Noske ). He belonged to the "left" wing of the KPD around Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow , who in 1924 took over the party leadership. Bartels became editor-in-chief of the Hamburger Volkszeitung and elected to the Reichstag in May 1924. After losing this mandate in the new elections in December of the same year, he became a member of the Prussian state parliament , to which he was a member of the KPD parliamentary group until 1928. As an opponent of the new party leadership set up in 1925 around Ernst Thälmann , he was expelled from the party in March 1927 and joined the Lenin League founded in 1928 . Until he converted to the SPD in early 1929, he edited the Leninbund organs, the flag of communism and the will of the people .

A little later he became editor-in-chief of the social democratic daily Volksfreund in Braunschweig, where he was also a member of the SPD district leadership. After the NSDAP came to power , Bartels was imprisoned in Braunschweig from May 1933 to March 1934. After being arrested again, he was held in the Dachau concentration camp from August to November 1935 . From now on, living under police supervision, he and his party friend Otto Grotewohl were arrested again in 1938, but the proceedings were discontinued. After another imprisonment in 1944 as part of the Grid Action , he was obliged to do military service in the last months of the war.

After 1945 he was a member of the SPD again, initially until 1955 he was the license holder and editor of the Hessische Nachrichten in Kassel. From 1956 to 1967 he published the magazine Das Gewissen - an independent organ for combating nuclear abuse and dangers .

literature

• Hermann Weber , Andreas Herbst: German communists. Biographical Handbook 1918 to 1945 . 2nd, revised and greatly expanded edition. Dietz, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-320-02130-6 ( online ).

Web links

• Wolfgang Bartels in the database of members of the Reichstag
• Bartels, Friedrich Wilhelm Richard Wolfgang. Hessian biography. (As of May 14, 2020). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).